Developing Social Justice Competence in Group Work through Intergroup Dialogue Co-Facilitation

We interviewed 10 doctoral students in counseling psychology who co-facilitated intergroup dialogue (IGD) groups as part of an advanced course on group interventions focused on diversity and social justice in group work in order to understand if and how IGD facilitation contributes to these students’ professional development. IGD is a small group intervention that brings together individuals from social identity groups with a history of conflict (e.g., people of color and White people) to build relationships across groups, develop a critical social consciousness, and develop capacities to promote social justice. Grounded theory was used to code the data and generate themes; rather than generating theory we used grounded theory to give rich description of the process. To help construct meaning, parts of the data were interpreted through a multicultural and social justice principles in counseling psychology, Social Cognitive Career Theory as applied to social justice, and the literature on group theory and practice. Implications for training counseling psychology doctoral students are discussed.